While you believe you are in a body, however, you can choose between loveless and miraculous channels of expression. You can make an empty shell, but you cannot express nothing at all. You can wait, delay, paralyze yourself, or reduce your creativity almost to nothing. But you cannot abolish it. You can destroy your medium of communication, but not your potential*. You did not create yourself.
*capable of development into actuality
— A Course in Miracles
The fact is, I can’t give up sleeping with the window open. Electric tramcars with all their bells ringing rage through my room. Automobiles drive across me. A door slams. Somewhere glass from a broken window clatters to the ground. I can hear the big pieces laughing and the little splinters sniggering. Then suddenly a dull muffled sound from inside a house on the other side. Someone’s coming up the stairs. Coming, coming, on and on, is there for a long time, goes past. Back in the street. A girl shrieks: ‘Ah, tais-toi, je ne veux plus!’ The tram, mad with excitement, races up, and across, and away. Someone is calling. People are running, overtaking one another. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning there’s even a cock crowing, and what a boundless blessing it is. Then, abruptly, I fall asleep.
— The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
I am because I am! means I exist because I exist and need no justification whatsoever for my existence. The fact of my being is enough. I require no terms, conditions or permits from myself or anyone else. I live, and in living I am fully entitled to go on living. My life, my existence, my being is not predicated on standards, values, achievements or accomplishments …
“How do I feel?” is a very important question as applied to people, issues, myself and especially as to my state of well-being. If I feel good, that’s good. If I feel bad, then is there anything I can do to make myself feel better? Am I involved in any way in a self-hating enterprise? Most important, do I feel bad because I haven’t accomplished enough? Achieved enough? Conformed enough? This is blackmail and antithetical to my philosophy. I must fight to give myself the right to feel good about myself and to feel good mood-wise, regardless of any accomplishment or nonaccomplishment whatsoever.
— Compassion and Self-Hate, Theodore Issac Rubin
